Snow Leopard Saves $10M In Energy Annually

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According to this article Apple’s new OS has the potential of saving $10M in energy annually.

Windows 7 has been boasting how it'll consume less energy and save users on battery life and energy costs. But Apple won't be left out on this angle for their OS. According to a CNET review, Snow Leopard could help users cut back on energy consumption by around 10%, and that means an overall savings of as much as $10 million could be realized.
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I figure these claims ought to get millions upon millions of Windows users a little hot under the collar which, if I am calculating this correctly, will lead to BILLIONS in savings on winter heating bills around the globe. That was my junk-science contribution for the day.
 
Not to sound ignorant, but I am uncertain as to how an operating system could affect power consumption, save for the obvious energy saver features that we already have now. (i.e. hibernation/sleep mode, screen powers off after x minutes, etc.)

What else could you do at the software level to improve power consumption past that, besides lowering the brightness/gamma output of the screen? (which in the case of the desktop is usually on the desktop as a feature as well, isn't it?) Because that's all I can think of. I would think that hardware would play a more vital role in energy savings past that. So what am I missing?
 
Actually its all about how many CPU/GPU cycles, etc. it takes to accomplish a task. The fewer resources it takes your program to run, the more energy efficient it becomes. My guess is that code could be far less resource intensive but far more labor intensive as the higher amounts of skill and time it would take to write such code.

My 2 cents.
 
Steve said:
According to this article Apple’s new OS has the potential of saving $10M in energy annually.



I figure these claims ought to get millions upon millions of Windows users a little hot under the collar which, if I am calculating this correctly, will lead to BILLIONS in savings on winter heating bills around the globe. That was my junk-science contribution for the day.
Click to expand...

Just good old hyperbolic and misleading Apple advertising. Look at what we're doing only while Windows did it ten times better.

Microsoft needs to get a good ad agency and stick to some type of good ad campaign like the "Mac vs PC" ads which as much stinking BS they contain are a great campaign. That said Apple has spent a zillion dollars on this campaign and my guess its that's lost money for them, maybe its sold a few Macs; they did gain a point or so market share but still the ads seem to be far better at humor than selling Macs.
 
Steve said:
Iwill lead to BILLIONS in savings on winter heating bills around the globe.
Click to expand...

wait... wait.... wait a second.
how does a computer consuming less energy save on a winter heating bill again?
computer = electricity
MOST heating = gas

electricity =\= gas

:confused:

:p
 
"Still, seeing the potential for any drop in energy consumption over the massive number of Mac users out there is positive, especially when we keep seeing our overall energy consumption increase thanks to our love affair with gadgets."

Massive indeed, when compared to, um, Windows users migrating to a new OS? (the contrast of this article)

And "gadgets" - by far the biggest reason for the world consuming more power :rolleyes: (or are they just talking about Mac users? Or - is a Mac a gadget, opposed to a real computer?)
 
j-sta said:
wait... wait.... wait a second.
how does a computer consuming less energy save on a winter heating bill again?
computer = electricity
MOST heating = gas

electricity =\= gas

:confused:

:p
Click to expand...

What's that?! Up there in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's the joke going waaayyyyyyyy over your head!

:p
 
So... does that mean people running Windows on their mac will use almost twice the energy since they are running OSX and Win 7
 
Nemesis999 said:
What's that?! Up there in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's the joke going waaayyyyyyyy over your head!

:p
Click to expand...

I lol'ed at this one. The wife wondered what I was laughing about, and when I told her, laughed too.
 
nicknations said:
So... does that mean people running Windows on their mac will use almost twice the energy since they are running OSX and Win 7
Click to expand...

Ya if it's a laptop, battery life is poor under Windows. Bad drivers or something.
 
Not impressed...

$10M annually, relative to how much people altogether spend annually on energy, is insignificant...$10M is a fraction.

What people save on energy will be offset by leaving the lights on. Although if you're one of these energy hippies you probably read by candlelight and refuse to own a car.
 
BigBeef said:
Not impressed...

$10M annually, relative to how much people altogether spend annually on energy, is insignificant...$10M is a fraction.

What people save on energy will be offset by leaving the lights on. Although if you're one of these energy hippies you probably read by candlelight and refuse to own a car.
Click to expand...

what a crock of shit
 
heatlesssun said:
Actually its all about how many CPU/GPU cycles, etc. it takes to accomplish a task. The fewer resources it takes your program to run, the more energy efficient it becomes. My guess is that code could be far less resource intensive but far more labor intensive as the higher amounts of skill and time it would take to write such code.

My 2 cents.
Click to expand...
So Apple has FINALLY cleaned up their code and its efficient enough to not waste extra cycles? I guess this is a good way to spin what you should be doing anyway, optimizing your code. Especially if you charge peopel to use your software. But its a nice way to hide that fact and make it seem like they are doing you a favor.

j-sta said:
:confused:
:p
Click to expand...

Yea, unless you are being super sarcastic and rolling along with Steve's joke, I think you need to pay attention to the part about being "hot under the collar". For a nerd/techie joke this was pretty good IMHO, eloquent, and brief.
 
pfft gas


160$ gets you a load of firewood, between my fireplace and my pc, my furnace never comes on :)

stupid apple marketing
 
heatlesssun said:
Just good old hyperbolic and misleading Apple advertising. Look at what we're doing only while Windows did it ten times better.
Click to expand...

It isn't hype when it is backed by reality.

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3540&p=10
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3580&p=4
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13

And finally, Vista vs Windows 7 RC1: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3582

Note that these are numbers from the old OS 10.5, and 10.6 has even better power management than that.

These are hard numbers from a very reputable source, zero hype. OS X has been tuned for low power consumption, which makes total sense considering that Apple's main focus are notebooks that do not compromise on performance or battery life while remaining thin and light.

If anything I hope this pressures Microsoft to improve power consumption in Windows. Why is competition a bad thing? Apple are very good at certain things and over the years it has only resulted in improved Microsoft products, that's how competition is supposed to work! Don't believe me, just search for Jim Allchin's emails to Gates and Ballmer going all the way back to 2003. A lot of what they've done over the last decade has been in direct response to what Apple has done, and IMHO that is a good thing. And if people start demanding better power management from Windows because OS X does it so well, we might just get it, that's better for everybody.
 
nicknations said:
So... does that mean people running Windows on their mac will use almost twice the energy since they are running OSX and Win 7
Click to expand...

Twice is an exaggeration but if you are measuring battery life, yes, running Windows will draw more power.
 
I'll also say that $10 million per year in energy savings is a drop in the bucket, a ridiculously small percentage of annual power consumption in the country. Its a bit much to gush over even if OS X has had this improvement, but whatever.
 
j-sta said:
wait... wait.... wait a second.
how does a computer consuming less energy save on a winter heating bill again?
computer = electricity
MOST heating = gas

electricity =\= gas

:confused:

:p
Click to expand...

I leave my computer on 24/7 during the winter time, helps keep my room warm.
 
You're talking about $1 per computer over the course of a year. I'm all for saving energy, etc., but that is so insignificant it's not worth talking about. You save literally a fraction of a penny per day.
 
kirbyrj said:
You're talking about $1 per computer over the course of a year. I'm all for saving energy, etc., but that is so insignificant it's not worth talking about. You save literally a fraction of a penny per day.
Click to expand...

I agree, the dollar figure is silly. The argument is much more compelling when they say that 10.6 is 10% more efficient. That adds up to over 30 minutes extra battery life with the unibody MPBs if true, not bad.

Putting it in the context of energy savings and being green is better PR these days I guess.
 
this might be too complex for most people we know, but i have a device that can save WAY more power than win7 or mac!

1132365_fd5c479ec1.jpg


i should get in touch with steve jobs so i can start marketing my invention!
 
I was going to reply with the same basic premise.

If you're concerned about energy savings, shut off the power and unplug it from the wall nightly.

That generates 0 power used and infinite savings potential.

Sigh, wtb some redwoods to hang smelly hippies from :D
 
of course you could save alot of energy on osx, you'll spend most of your time staring at the screen doing nothing,lol

(yeah i know Id hit a nerve somewhere with that comment,lol)
 
dyzophoria said:
of course you could save alot of energy on osx, you'll spend most of your time staring at the screen doing nothing,lol

(yeah i know Id hit a nerve somewhere with that comment,lol)
Click to expand...

Meh, it might strike a nerve, but let's face it. If these numbers are right every Mac user is gonna pocket an extra 100 grand this year. So crack all the jokes you want, they're gettin' rich!:D
 
For battery life, 10% makes a difference. For desktop systems, not so much. OSX has always been more efficient than Windows in this regard.Macbooks have a significantly longer battery life than equivalent PCs with similar sized batteries. When you switch to Windows on the Macbook, they're about the same as the any other laptop.
 
/me notes that the linux kernel has had a tickless feature for quite some time now resulting in a nice energy saving
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
eeyrjmr said:
/me notes that the linux kernel has had a tickless feature for quite some time now resulting in a nice energy saving
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
Click to expand...

Still, my netbook battery last 15-30 minutes longer under XP than Ubuntu.
 
try powertop. It will show u what keeps waking the kernel up. He the kernel keeps getting woken up due to some app it wont do its job.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
hity645 said:
I leave my computer on 24/7 during the winter time, helps keep my room warm.
Click to expand...

same here my 2 folding computers keep the house warm norm do not have the heating on (but 6 9800GX2 cards most likely use more power then the gas heating cost wise)
 
got a vostro 1400 here and if I use the min display settings like a mac I get over 5 hours but screen is too dark so I up it a few and get 4 hours. I am sure i could stretch it out if I disabled BT amd told windows to spin down the hdd every chance it got.. that's what 9 cell batteries do :p
 
Anyone else notice Snow Leopard only uses less power while Idle? If you're going to save money by not using your computer, how about doing what the above users suggested and turning it off? SL uses a few more watts under load.
 
Just bought an old Fujitsu Stylistic ST4120P tablet off Craig's List the other day, Pentium 3 Mobile 933, 512MB, 10.4" passive screen, and it has a 9 cell extended. Damned thing is about 6.5 years old but, with a clean installation of XP Tablet Edition 2005 I tested it with a full charge the other day with 11b wireless on the entire time (occasional surfing, mp3 playback for over 4 hours, random shuffle of files on the hard drive, and about 1 hour of streaming audio thrown into the mix to put stress on the wireless usage):

6 hours 14 mins... not too shabby for such an old piece of hardware, eh? :p
 
It seems as though Apple want so show its a better solution to Windows, but always compares itself to windows. I say it needs to find its own merits, and show how that impacts the end user in a beneficial and unique way.
 
You know the "Reality Distortion Field" is not a joke.

Optimize the code a bit, do something a bit different makes the cpu work less for the same tasks. Sell it as an amazing energy saving package !!!!

But hey, this is how Apple is having success, it's dishing out BS and people is buying it.

This is what I call fuzzy science.

Microsoft is retarded for letting Apple get all the attention. They should do better in terms of advertising. Because this is purely a marketing thing. There is no reason whatsoever to 1) believe their claim, 2) pay for it and 3) make a huge deal about it.
 
syntx - How is it BS when its backed up by hard numbers? Here is a cut/paste from earlier:

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/show...px?i=3540&p=10
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3580&p=4
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13

And finally, Vista vs Windows 7 RC1: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3582

Note that these are numbers from the old OS 10.5, and 10.6 has even better power management than that.

These are hard numbers from a very reputable source, zero hype. OS X has been tuned for low power consumption, which makes total sense considering that Apple's main focus are notebooks that do not compromise on performance or battery life while remaining thin and light.

If anything I hope this pressures Microsoft to improve power consumption in Windows. Why is competition a bad thing? Apple are very good at certain things and over the years it has only resulted in improved Microsoft products, that's how competition is supposed to work! Don't believe me, just search for Jim Allchin's emails to Gates and Ballmer going all the way back to 2003. A lot of what they've done over the last decade has been in direct response to what Apple has done, and IMHO that is a good thing. And if people start demanding better power management from Windows because OS X does it so well, we might just get it, that's better for everybody.

Now, I do think the phrasing is ridiculous; $10 million per year in energy savings is a drop in the bucket as far as our annual power consumption. However, 10% greater power efficiency over what was already a very power efficient OS? That's a pretty good selling point, especially for those on notebooks. Now I'm very interested to see benchmarks on a MBP, if the numbers hold (and it isn't just energy saving when the machine is idle) it will translate to something like an additional 30-40 minutes of battery life, not bad.
 
Think about all the power savings if every Apple user just turned his or her PC off!
 
syntx said:
You know the "Reality Distortion Field" is not a joke.

Optimize the code a bit, do something a bit different makes the cpu work less for the same tasks. Sell it as an amazing energy saving package !!!!

But hey, this is how Apple is having success, it's dishing out BS and people is buying it.
Click to expand...

Finally, you all should actually read the article. The figure wasn't given out as a piece of Apple PR, it was from an independent review that the article linked: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10335460-1.html

Again, I can't wait for Anand to run another battery test.
 
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